Five Blogs That Make Me Think

When Nicolai and I started this blog a year ago we were hoping for a plural readership. Now that we’ve hit that target we can move on to the next: making our readers think. Fortunately, we’ve already succeeded with at least one reader: Nijma of Camel’s Nose, who named O&M one of five blogs that make her think. This is one of those “memes” in which each blogger named is supposed to name five bloggers who make him think, who in turn name five bloggers that make them think, and so on, until everyone is nested under someone else, sort of like Amway but without money changing hands.

The Thinking Blog’sIlker Yoldas is responsible for all this (and for supplying the nice graphic above). Yoldas describes the exercise as a humanistic alternative to blog ranking systems like Technorati based on quantitative analysis of linking patterns, just as “human-powered” search engines like ChaCha are alternatives to Google.

Anyway, I’ll play along. Here are five blogs that make me think. (To make things interesting I’ve excluded the sites listed already on the blogroll below.)